The future might seem bleak, but at least it holds lots of projects by director Ava DuVernay. That body of work will now include a television show based on the story of a woman saved from a ruined Earth by aliens. Timely!

Ava DuVernay with another one! It was announced Wednesday that the filmmaker has another stellar project on the way. This time, she's teaming up with Charles D. King's Macro Ventures and acclaimed director/writer Victoria Mahoney for a television adaptation of Octavia Butler's science-fiction novel, Dawn.

In Octavia Butler's 1987 novel Dawn, a human race in danger of extinction is given a final chance to survive by mating with an alien species to create a new hybrid race. The first book in Butler's Lilith's Brood series (formerly Xenogenesis), adaptation rights were recently acquired by producer Allen Bain ("Revenge of the Green Dragons").

The other day, it was announced that Allen Bain’s Bainframe production company had optioned Butler’s Dawn for television. This is the first book in the Lilith’s Brood series, previously known as the Xenogenesis series. We were wondering how Bain could possibly do justice to such a challenging book—so we asked him. Here’s what he told us.

EXCLUSIVE: Under his new Bainframe banner, Allen Bain has made the company’s first acquisition for television. Bainframe has optioned rights to late-author Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn, the first book in what was known as the Xenogenisis volume, now the Lilith’s Brood collection.